Andrew Tate’s Reckoning Is Here

I’m going to name a bunch of things that used to get you kicked out of polite society: Being a pornographer; hitting a 15-year-old girl with a belt on camera in essentially a sexual fetish video; bragging about teaching men to “pimp hoes”; suckering women into posing nude on camera for your own financial gain; running a grift business to convince ignorant young men that if there are videos of them shirtless in their Romanian warehouse with fancy cars, smoking cigars with a bunch of clout-chasing women in the background, they will get rich; teaching those same young men that all women are trash and whores.

People who did such things used to be unwelcome. Unwelcome to dinner, unwelcome at church, unwelcome in the halls of power, and unwelcome by important and influential voices shaping our politics and our culture — but no longer.

But here’s the point: Sin has consequences, always and forever.

On Saturday morning, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested in Miami for extradition to the U.K. on 38 new criminal charges, bringing the total charges against them to 59.

Those criminal charges included child and extreme pornography, rape, and sexual assault.

I want to talk about why these two obvious scumbags and grifters were welcomed into polite society, championed as heroes and truth tellers, because a society that embraces sin destroys itself.

Sin has consequences. I know it’s not cool to point out that sin actually exists, and that it actually has real-world consequences.

I don’t give a damn about being cool. I mean, look at me; I’ve never been cool, and I don’t care. I have never cared. I will never care because the truth is still the truth.

Reality is still reality.

Sin always has and always will have consequences.

Engaging in sin is like jumping off a 100-story building. The first 99 stories, super-fun. And then that last story where your face meets the concrete – not so much.

That’s what happened to pornographer, grifter, alleged rapist and admitted pimp Andrew Tate and his idiot brother Tristan yesterday, when they were arrested in Miami for extradition to the UK: Their faces finally hit the concrete.

The Tate brothers are two failed kickboxers whose scam originated as a webcam operation in Romania, where they essentially dragged more than 75 women into webcam pornography, and they made a lot of money from it.

But in 2016, after getting kicked off Big Brother UK — a British reality TV show — for hitting a woman with a belt, Andrew Tate formed ties with the likes of Alex Jones and then glommed onto pro-Trump anti-war messaging with a slew of transgressive political talking points.

And this is where his big fame and fortune came in. The next part is important because even if you’ve never heard of the Tates, your kids definitely have. Since 2016, TikTok has been the primary driver of Andrew Tate’s reach. Communist Chinese party TikTok videos tagged with Andrew Tate have amassed over 13 billion views on YouTube. Even though the Tates have been officially banned from the platform, clip channels dedicated to reposting the Tates’ content have accumulated some 230 million views on X. Tate’s account regularly achieved millions of impressions by 2019, and the manosphere became part of our cultural conversation.

The manosphere was a bunch of men explaining that the only way to truly be a man was to treat women like trash, work out a lot, walk around shirtless, and violate all of society’s taboos.

I have a basic rule. I hate when men rape women. I hate when men engage in pornography. I hate it when men run alleged sex trafficking rings or grifts that target vulnerable young men, treat them as morons to be milked for cash, prey on their vulnerability, teach them that the best way to get ahead in the world is to treat women like garbage, and simultaneously spread Andrew Tate clips.

I think all that stuff is bad. I also think that if you are very concerned, as I am, about Muslim men raping white women in Britain, which is a very, very big thing that happened in Rotherham for years, you should probably also be against allegations of Muslim men raping white women in Britain, even if their last name is Tate.

So here’s the big question: Why did they get away with all of this for so long? Why were so many people into the Tates’ stuff?

The answer is really quite obvious, but it’s something we seem to have forgotten. The Tates are sinful people, and sin can be fun for some people. Sin has always been fun for some people.

This is true in every Biblical text. If it weren’t fun, people wouldn’t do it. If it weren’t transgressive, people would not do it. The sin of eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden was the transgressiveness.

People are drawn to sin. We have to acknowledge the reality of male nature. Andrew Tate is, for an enormous number of men, an embodiment of what the worst part of men wish they could get away with: consequence-free sexual promiscuity, selfish consumerism, abandoning the kids, shacking up with all the clout-chasing models next door, zero job, zero work, zero consequences.

All fun, all the time, all sin.

Everyone knows what the Tates are doing is bad. But for some, the badness is actually the point, because the badness demonstrates that “we are free.”

Being free from the consequences of sin used to be a Leftist preference; that was the draw of the Marxists in the 1920s. That was the draw of the Left in the 1960s: free love, copious drugs, and zero consequences. But increasingly, freedom to sin has become a Right-wing action as well.

How did sin become so popular on the Right? We’re supposed to be the people who have systemic immunity to this. We go to church, demand standards and personal behavior, and want the Ten Commandments up on classroom walls.

I’ve been saying this sort of stuff for my entire career, since I was 17. I have been promoting traditional virtue all along. Very early on in my career, I was mocked incessantly for the fact that I openly said that I was a virgin until marriage, which is a thing that I did and my wife did also. And now we are married for 18 years with five beautiful children, because virtue is good and sin is bad.

But people mock that. They mock it: “You’re a fuddy-duddy. You’re a stick in the mud. You’re uptight. Why can’t you just be a little cooler?”

I don’t care about being cool. I care about the truth.

But reactionary politics is sinful because it tends to legitimize sin.

Traditionally, societies construct a series of seawalls against sin. If you have an ocean of sin and it’s threatening a tsunami, you have to have some seawalls.

The first seawall was societal shame. If you were a pornographer, for example, you were not welcome in polite society. You weren’t welcome at church. You weren’t welcome at family dinners. Nothing. Get out. We don’t want you here. You’re gross. Stay away from me. Stay away from my kids. Stay away from my community.

The social Left decided that all this was far too judgmental. So the Left in the West constructed systems designed to minimize the consequences of sin and to obliterate social standards. We created entire welfare states not just to alleviate poverty, but to sever the consequences of sin. We actually incentivize things like sexual promiscuity and drug use, sometimes by accident, sometimes even on purpose, by treating these not as moral problems, but as “social diseases” that could be alleviated with simple cash outlays.

The idea was that poverty created sin; thus, alleviate poverty, and you alleviate sin, rather than the reality that, very often in a free system, sin creates poverty because there are consequences to making bad decisions.

But we decided that societal consequences were bad, so social consequences were destroyed. For the Left, to alleviate the consequences of sin materially while allowing people to still sit in judgment would be mean and judgmental, and we wouldn’t want that. We have to be nice.

Conversely, we as a society decided that it was vitally important to stigmatize people with social standards. These people were prudes. They were cruel, and they hated love. They hated joy. They were probably even suppressing their own perversity; if you stood for virtue, the truth was probably you were hiding some shame of your own.

Or you should be made to feel ashamed because you are being the worst thing of all: judgmental.

The Right didn’t sit still for this, but the blowback when it came didn’t come in the form of a restoration of standards. Instead, politics became incredibly reactionary.

Politics is basically a pendulum that swings from side to side. The Right reacted by embracing anybody who would tear down the Left  — no matter what it took. The reactionary Right decided that it actually needed transgressive figures, people who were sinful, who wouldn’t play by the old rules.

The sin was now the point. After all, you could only defeat the shame-using Left not by course-correcting and saying. “No, no. Here’s what virtue looks like,” but rather by being totally shameless, totally transgressive.

And guess what? That was fun for them. Because sin is fun. Because being transgressive of values is fun. And it’s particularly fun when you can justify it to yourself.

No one wants to respond to transgressive evil by standing with good. Good is boring. Good is demanding. Good is dutiful.

Some people want to engage in evil because evil is fun and addictive. And once they have the excuse, it’s much more fun to go all the way.